Made It To Earth

The question of how zombies made it to earth, Mason can’t answer. Zombies don’t speak, as you know, so we can’t ask them. But their own system of communication could potentially reveal something if we can learn it.

Zombie language is something that a hot babe on Mason’s team is trying to unravel. I know what this team member looks like because there was a photo of her in the newspaper. There’s been a bit of a media frenzy about their discoveries, actually, or what passes for one in this era of two television news stations.

After we discuss the article over dinner, Eve comes in to the room where I’m sitting down with a washcloth full of ice on my forehead. (I still get headaches from being knocked down and dragged off and having god knows what else done to me.)

Eve sits on the coffee table next to the couch. She holds out the newspaper, and I move the cold cloth out of the way to see. She taps the photo of the research team and with her index finger, draws a circle around that particular researcher, a woman with blond hair and long, slender legs.

“What do you think?”

I consider pretending I don’t know what she’s asking, but figure the conversation will take longer if I do, and we’ll still end up at the same place. Might as well speed it along. “You’re asking me this because Mason disappears all hours of the day and night and goes off with these people. And now it turns out that one of the team looks like Grace Kelly, only with a warmer smile. Is that it?”

Eve nods. Possibly, she’s close to tears. “She has a Ph.D., Jane. I don’t have a Ph.D.”

“Plus, Mason’s working with her on something exciting and important,” I said. “I can see how this potentially could suck for you.”

“Remember when Mason and I were first dating, there was that insect woman, the one from New York he co-presented with at some conference? And they had all that late night preparation?”

Weirdly enough, I do. I can’t remember a two-week period in April when I was sucked up into an alien spacecraft. But ask me about a fifteen-year old dalliance between my best friend’s boyfriend and an entomologist, and I’m all over it.

Jill Riddell is a writer in Chicago. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute and has a weakness for nature, magic, and pennies abandoned in sidewalk cracks.

Trop is a project of the Pasadena Arts Council’s EMERGE Fiscal Sponsorship Program.